[Freedombox-discuss] How do we handle package upgrades on the Freedombox?

[james.valleroy@gmail.com (James Valleroy)]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 4:57 AM, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com> wrote:
> [Jonas Smedegaard]
>> Seems to me that you are basically arguing that debconf in its
>> current form only legally works on initial install and interactively
>> by admins - not as automated reconfiguration by other packages.
>>
>> Is that correctly understood?
>
> Almost.  The current tool set have those features.  I suspect debconf
> with appropriately implemented packages can be used (ie using yet to
> be written tools to "fake" the interactively by admins part) to do
> this.
>
> Debconf have support for replacing both the frontend/gui and
> backend/database, and I suspect this might be used for automated
> reconfiguration of packages.  But I am not sure, and have never seen
> this done.
>
> This is the background for my suggestion to prefer .d setup or
> multilevel setup, which I know work. :)

First, sorry for reviving a 2-year old thread. But I finally came
across an answer to the question of using debconf for non-interactive
re-configuration. :)

The approach described here uses DEBCONF_DB_OVERRIDE:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825107#15

It looks a bit clunky, but it works, and allows the package to remain
policy-compliant by reading configuration values from disk in the
normal case.